Project Workspace

Collaboration

WSFF is a coalition of sanitation, social innovation, financial, legal, and commercial actors committed to working together to transform sanitation into a vibrant, everyday human economic activity.

Participating organizations recognize that new thinking is required to contribute to the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation in 2015, and indeed to achieving universal sanitation coverage. By bringing these players together onto a common platform speaking a common language, WSFF aims to forge connections that support a streamlined capital flow for the sanitation market.

Our approach is to crystallize the sanitation issue through a set of distinct business lines on a common metrics platform, identifying the full value of the market including social externalities. This approach not only attracts commercial and innovation expertise to the sanitation issue, but also creates a framework to bring additional partners and expertise to work together on the issue. For example, leading organizations in the agriculture and climate sectors are taking a keen interest in sanitation, as well as the corporate sector driven by bottom-of-the-market opportunities.

The identification of the relevant financial tools and corporate partners for each business line brings clarity to the marketplace, while ensuring through social finance that a fair and equitable margin also goes to the community and social entrepreneurs, thus incentivizing and empowering the community in the process. For the traditional corporate world it offers a mechanism to aggregate the market quickly (and profitably) and to address the issue of fragmentation which has deterred many from engaging.

In terms of other scaling models, the creation of new legal hybrid partnerships accommodates both commercial and not-for-profit enterprises in the same legal structure. The distribution power of the larger existing social sector players - such as BRAC and the Grameen Bank - will also be leveraged. While there is clearly no single solution, an approach driven by business lines on a common metrics process ensures that synergies and learning can be effectively communicated.